Sep

3

I’m a shlump when it comes to watching television – I tend not to watch it except for the popcorn stuff – you know, junk food for the brain. So I’ve managed to miss Campbell Brown before this morning when ran into her Monday night intervew with Tucker Bounds on CNN. Just in case you missed seeing the media stir about this when McCain’s camp canceled their scheduled CNN interview, citing a relentless refusal by certain on-air reporters to come to terms with John McCain’s selection of Alaska’s sitting governor as our party’s nominee for vice president. That’s not quite what I saw… take a look at the whole interview:

FULL INTERVIEW: Tucker Bounds on Palin

I think what they meant was ‘Yo, CNN! Pull in the reins on that Brown bitch! Did you forget to give her the memo about nodding and smiling when our people ignore the questions and respond with non-answers and evasion?’That’s apparently the accepted interview technique for the campaign – listen for a single keyword in the question, and respond with a talking point that uses the keyword in a way that attacks the Democratic candidate or policies in general. Thus, the question “How can the Republicans justify choosing Palin when they’ve made such an issue of foreign policy experience?” is answered with a paean of praise for McCain’s ‘foreign’ experience. And somehow the question of foreign policy experience gets twisted into a discussion of ‘executive experience’, which the campaign can rightly claim Palin, who has served as a mayor and a governor, has. Even there, though, Bounds can’t get it right. When Brown challenges his assertion that ‘whenever the National Guard is deployed to Iraq, that’s a governor’s decision’ by pointing out that decisions of foreign deployment and equipping the National Guard are not made by individual governors, he responds by accusing her of belittling every decision that Palin made as an executive – yet he can’t name a single one.The decision to cancel the McCain interview with Larry King is not about Palin. It’s not about defending McCain’s Vice Presidential pick. It’s a clear message to the media that they had better handle McCain and his people with kid gloves or the campaign will take all its toys and go home.